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The story goes that the Luftwaffe reserved
a special hatred for the 100th. Supposedly earlier in the war over
Europe a badly shot-up B-17 that was straggling alone over occupied France
lowered its landing gear as a sign of capitulation. The German
Fighters seeing this, moved in alongside the Fortress close enough to
wave the B-17 on into where they wanted the American crew to put down.
Apparentley, the B-17 gunners didn't get the message and opened up on
the Luftwaffe aircraft and mauled several of them, before they themselves
were shot from the sky. From that day forward, the LW made it a point
to hunt down anything with a Box D on the tail.
Here are some photos of the 100th BG. Some are group photos. Some
were taken by me. Some were taken by Jim Schwank.
While I had been born in Kansas City, my family moved to Pennsylvania
early on which is where I grew up, and eventually graduated from Penn
State just before I went into the
Air Corps. It is also where I met my wife and mother of our 7 children.
Her being 100% Pennsylvania Dutch and me being from the only Irish
Catholic family in our hometown has made for some very interesting times
in our lives together. Come to think of it, it still does.
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Here are several pictures of Miss
Chief and some others, taken while at our permanent station at Thorpe
Abbot.
In the above picture, Lt. McKenizie,our
bombardier checking chin turret guns as crew chief Sgt. Light.looks on
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This is the tower at Thorpe Abbot that we
took as we taxied by.
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Don Rice, Gunner, Bill Cherry
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Refueling "Feaver Beaver". Another
of the famous or infamous 100th BG's B-17s.
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Rosie's Rivters. Robert Rosenthal's famous
B-17. He flew 96 combat missions. A true hero. Nuff Said
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This is not Miss Chief, but rather another
plane from the Group at Thorpe Abbot. The ball turret gunner, while
cleaning out his guns, forgot to shut them off. He must have hit something,
because they started firing and killed him at point blank range.
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B-24 named Lamb Chop was at Thorpe Abbot
the same day I was taking pictures.. For some reason I thought this plane
looked like a banana boat which is what I called it. After my 35 missions,
I went south as an instructor in B-24s.
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While this shell hole doesn't look very
ominous, it was enough to take the life of the radio operator.
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